This image shows the new voxel outline option, drawing each filled voxel with a thin border. It also shows the new interactive tool preview feature, drawing a red box to show where the next splatted voxel will appear. Both of these options, as well as a new tool dragging feature can be modified in the preferences dialog.

A lot of code has been changed under the hood of Sproxel for this release. The results of these changes are not immediately visible, but upcoming versions will leverage the new technology in the form of layers, animation, selection, cut/copy/paste, indexed palettes, and various other features. Stay tuned!

Friday, August 19, 2011

The SIGGRAPH conference was in Vancouver, British Columbia this year. Both the city and the weather were beautiful, so it made for a great week.

A rather apropos sculpture named the Digital Orca by Douglas Coupland greeted convention goers just outside the center. Some people refer to this as the "pixelized killer whale" but since you're on this page, you probably know it's not made of pixels, it's made of voxels! This seemed like just the job for Sproxel. I took a few dozen reference photos before I headed back to the Bay Area, and after spending a couple hours with the results and Sproxel v0.4, I created what I believe to be a complete model of the Digital Orca.

This model, as well as the Sproxel "tree" model you see everywhere on this page, are now available for download on the Sproxel Downloads Page. Just download samples.zip, uncompress it, and load the CSV files into your favorite version of Sproxel!

I often find that using my own tools helps give me an appreciation for what users want in a software package. This project encouraged me to implement a couple UI features that you will be able to use in the next version of Sproxel. Stay tuned!

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Due to a nice vacation and this year's SIGGRAPH conference, I haven't had much time to work on Sproxel in the last few weeks. I'll return to the Bay Area in seven days, and will be able to resume development, focusing on selections, slices, and a moving "builder brush" style development region (thanks for the suggestions on the feature requests wiki). In the meantime, here is a screenshot of something I've been playing with. I hope to have more news soon!

Saturday, July 2, 2011

OBJ export is much improved. You can now export quads or triangles. The resulting mesh is now airtight and contains no internal polygons. This allows for operations requiring perfect connectivity to be performed.

Image import - using File->Import, you can import a standard 2d image into the grid. BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF image file formats are all supported.

Mirroring around any axis.

Rotation clockwise and counter clockwise around any axis.

Window positions are now saved on exit and restored on startup.

A new Edit->Preferences dialog exists where you can change grid size and color, background color, and a few other minor UI features.

This image, courtesy of Metin at http://www.sevensheaven.nl/ illustrates some of the effects you can achieve using Sproxel's new seamless OBJ export and importing into a package like 3dStudio Max, Maya, or Blender.